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Brain Interface Lets Monkeys Control Prosthetic Limbs
himicos was one of many readers to point out one recent success of scientists working to develop working brain-machine interfaces, writing "A team at the university of Pittsburgh has finally advanced a 2002 technology enough for use in prosthetic limbs, the targeted application all along. Training computer models to the firing patterns of the neurons in the parts of the brain that control motion, they are able to project the intentions of a monkey to a robotic arm, which follows the will of the animal.
The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored." Reader phpmysqldev adds a link to coverage at the BBC, and writes "This of course brings significant hope to amputees and other other people with physical disabilities." (Note that this research has been going on for quite some time.)
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
if/when we invent lightsabers, we should have the robotic limb problem solved. other than that, this should help paralyzed people move again
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
How about custom appendages? If the brain can be trained to independently control a new arm, why couldn't it learn to control a genuine Doctor Octopus suit?
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
So ... I realize that this will ultimately be adapted to humans, but could it be adapted to something else?
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Specifically, I'm thinking of adapting a laser prosthetic arm, to be used by the poor, armless sharks
It's just an idea
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
I've got 1,000 of these smelly bastards sitting in a room full of typewriters, and NOT ONE of them has produced the works of Shakespeare yet.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's nothing, I know tons of girls like Rogue, that can steal your powers by touching you.
stuff |
>>This of course brings significant hope to amputees
As long as they don't mind carrying a monkey to control their prosthetic arm...
How would you explain the beauty of a sunset to the blind?
Now the infinite number of monkeys will only need to *think* about Hamlet.
The monkey in the pictures had his own arms restrained within tubes so that he/she would be forced to use the mechanical arm in order to get the marshmallow, and the mechanical arm isn't oriented so that the monkey could possibly mistake it for his/her own arm. I can't help but wonder what the monkey's opinion of all this is. It's got to be more than a little confusing.
Almost in time for our war with largest incident of severed limbs due to IED's.
I knew a guy in college who was working in this field. He went on to do master's work at Cornell. Incidentally he had no arms.
This will be great to improve the standard of living for many of the returning soldiers.
Eschew Obfuscation
Don't forget to always mount a scratch monkey.
Why does a piece of flatbread want this research to stop?
Get back to me when they can use the robotic arm to fling poo.
Oh yea that will be a big hit, for the general public. Showing all the math that needs to be done. or Show a picture of a monkey with a robotic arm. Lets face it math is not a spectator sport. To observe the beuity of it you will need to sit down and look at it proove it to yourself then you can admire it. However Most people don't have the time to sit down and follow equations that most mathamatitions follow the old scheme of using Greek symbols as shortcuts to (porposly) make it very difficult to read for non math majors. Heck I have a Math Minor and the symbols require me to look them up, and figuring out in what area the math is used the same symbol can mean different things. A simple example Pi in Geomontry is different then Pi in Statitics. Math is not a spectator sport to appreate its beuity takes time, if you are not intimatly involved with it it gets that much more cryptic.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Miguel Nicolelis is doing this kind of job and seems to be much more advanced. http://www.thinkartificial.org/machine-interfaces/monkey-brain-makes-robot-walk/ He actually made a monkey in the US control a robot in Japan by walking on a treadmill. The monkey had a screen showing the robot. After realizing that she (the monkey) could actually move the robot by thinking, she developed in her brain something that enabled her to control the robot and not have to walk herself. Thus, she could earn the rewards and not have to spend her energy. Very interesting stuff.
Back in the early 80s there was major buzz about using computers to restore movement to people paralyzed by spinal injuries. In a nutshell, a computer would send properly sequenced jolts to the person's leg muscles, enabling them to walk. In tests this more or less worked. The electronics at the time were too big to make it practical but the hope was that in the future (now) computers would be portable and powerful enough to do the job. I recall a number of hopeful reports on "60 Minutes" regarding this research, and even a TV movie about the researcher leading the effort. But all this seems to have fallen off the radar.
Anyone have the straight dope on this research? Because if it does work it stands to reason that if a person could control an artificial limb with their thoughts controlling real limbs would also be possible.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I am amazed at the number of responses being just smug and claiming how you need to do math to appreciate the beauty. Reminds me of a guy doing PhD is Chemistry about effects of certain chiral isomer of nicotine on cancer. His first response when I asked what he worked on was "You won't get it". I am a PhD student in computational geometry and I frequently have to explain my work to relatives who have no idea about geometry. When I pestered the guy that whether or not he can explain his work to a layman reflects his understanding about his work, he agreed to try. Of course I could understand the central part once he replaced the technical name of the molecule with "a chiral isomer of nicotine". I am sure it could have been further simplified as "mirror image molecule of the stuff in tobacco" in case I didn't remember what "chiral" and "nicotine" are.
On the topic, I am not entirely sure about the exact math used in the said experiment but based on the fact that the link points to the notion of "information content", here is my guess how it should work (at least in principle). I will try just because no one else seems to. Feel free to correct me.
The state of the neurons of the relevant area of the brain (relevant for the goal in the experiment - say pick marshmallows or open the door) could be modeled as a random variable. The first problem when trying to figure out what a certain electrical activity in brain represents would be to figure out whether you are looking at a random electrical activity (brain doing lots of background work maybe) or some order (brain trying to focus and activate the subroutine for "move hand and open door"). This difference between order and chaos is captured in a neat formula describing the entropy or the information content of the random variable. Naturally, the less the entropy the more the order. I have no idea what possibly goes on after this step.
In any case, now coming to the "beauty" part. Of course you need an eye to appreciate beauty for the notion is quite subjective. The remarkable thing is that a simple formula captures the vague notion of "order" that we all have. The formula might not be the most beautiful thing because as I understood from the article, the log term is somewhat forced to make sure different things add up nicely. But then, one could think of this very fact (the extra log term) as a neat mathematical representation of the notion that disorder should be able to be combined with another disorder to create something bigger.
I hope my response is better than "drop whatever you are doing and go do a PhD in math before you can understand the beauty of math".
Shannon entropy has been a standard tool in data communications for a very long time--telcos use this math to make your phones work. It's effectively a way of quantifying the informational content of a signal, which can be used to determine exactly what kind of bandwidth you need in a bandwidth-limited environment. I'm uncertain what it's used for in the context of a brain-machine interface.
Any good data communications textbook would have some nice examples in it, and actually that wikipedia article posted is very readable and informative.
- I for one welcome our very hard mathematics doing overlords
- I for one welcome our new bionic monkey overlords
In Soviet Russia the same league isn't even in THEM!!!!Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
PITA is a bread?! I thought it was an acronym describing my wife. She sure does love the monkeys
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Didn't say it hadn't, but the colour and resolution on those things isn't going to be much use for watching a sunset :P
which is totally what she said
You're right. What's really sad is the number of sighted people who can but simply don't bother.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I saw this technology on a video on either TLC or Discovery SEVERAL years ago. The monkey could move a robotic arm with its brain waves. Old news. On the same episode, they showed a fella moving a cursor on a computer screen with the same technique. Also cool, on that episode, was a prosthetic leg for a guy who had his amputated above the knee. They bolted a titanium socket into his femur that protruded out of the bottom of his "nub" that could "jack" into the prosthetic knee and leg. He could, in some fashion, sense touch on the prosthetic (vibrations or something up into his real leg).
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
The really cool thing that they're totally missing is that prosthetic limbs aren't limited to replacements.
Research has shown that the brain has the ability to handle additional limbs and/or senses. So if an amputee can learn to control a replacement arm, then a normal person could also learn to control an extra pair of arms. The neat thing is that the brain would just adapt to it and it would seem natural.
"The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored."
The sadder thing is that the discovery of response patterns of amputated limbs being mapped to other parts of the body is totally ignored.
A man had his arm removed. A psychiatrist attending happened to note that the man claimed to "feel" things in his missing hand when other parts of his body were touched. After careful mapping, three different response maps were found -- one each on his arm, chest and back. Each was so sensitive that individual fingers could be stimulated and he could correctly tell which.
This major discovery in neural plasticity makes it totally unnecessary to try to decode signals from electrode either drilled through the skull, or else placed on the surface and reading signals though the scalp, skull and dura mater, which reduces the signal by 3 orders of magnitude. Either way, these signals require some massive processing because a significant command/response signal (ie. an electrical response representing a single Hebbian cellular assembly that can be clearly decoded to an intent as stated in the article) comes from 0.3% to 3% of the neurons in the region being detected, the vast majority of the signal needing rejection as false positive or noise. Using the mapped response regions allows for signal analysis based on EMG patterns that are not expected at all in the area under the electrodes, making detection and analysis trivial.
TFA and most such research is not about giving amputees mobility. It is about decoding and using neural signals. If it were about the former, easier ways would have been used and the job already accomplished. It is about the latter because such things make more news, get more recognition, and therefore result in more grant application success.
The resulting technology will only be applied to prosthetics as a secondary result. Its primary use will be in such as hands-off controls for fighter pilots (see Clint Eastwood's "Firefox" for your obligatory Slashdot sci-fi/movie reference), tank crews and mobile missile launchers. Maybe this is the saddest part of all, but ignoring a more certain path to success as far as prosthetics is a sad piece.
Also sad, with a touch of irony, is the fact that the weaponry applications will be untenable because of the heuristic nature of neural processing -- getting it close but error prone will be fast, getting it right will be no faster or require less effort than hand operated controls. The slow speed and so the ability to use real-time perceptual feedback with prosthetics will make that far more successful. It remains to be seen whether after the war applications fail the research continues (ie. there is adequate funding offered) with respect to prosthetics. If someone like the US Veterans Administration picks it up when DARPA drops it, it might. I'm not hopeful.
The portion of the above that's assertion or opinion is based on the same professional experience as the portion that's not. That experience includes development of some of the "beautiful" maths decried as being ignored. Having been prosthetic-wrist deep in the research and from both directions, I find that a minor point to consider as "sad".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B